Product Description

The antidote to fast food - recipes that can be part-cooked or prepared in advance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193901 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-08
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Synopsis
GOOD TEMPERED FOOD is quiet, unhurried, unchaotic cooking to be savoured with its natural accompaniments - conversation, music and a glass of wine. This book is filled with the food we love to eat and cook, and is all about reuniting yourself with a sense of pleasure in the kitchen, rediscovering that 'slow' and 'time taken' doesn't mean difficult. Tamasin shows how to make your cooking life easier by preparing food in advance (such as leisurely cooked casseroles and mashed potatoes which stay perfect in the fridge for four days) and explains how to coordinate instructions and timing when planning and preparing. It's about enjoying the process of cooking from conception, gestation, picking, plucking, peeling, preparing and waiting. GOOD TEMPERED FOOD is what proper cooking is all about.

About the Author
Tamasin Day-Lewis is one of Britain's finest food writers, to be ranked along with Nigel Slater and Simon Hopkinson. She writes an avidly followed column for Saturday's TELEGRAPH and COUNTRY HOMES AND INTERIORS, and is a regular contributor to VANITY FAIR and VOGUE. She has just completed her second television series, TAMASIN'S WEEKENDS.

Customer Reviews

I really love this cookbook
I've been a big fan of Tamasin's and I find her recipes as well as her commitment to organic ingredients (and supporting local suppliers) to be really inspiring.

Here's what is great about this cookbook. First, the recipes are remarkably varied. You have everything from leeks and arborio rice in phyllo pastry to the truly divine Chocolate Espresso Cake. Nothing is particularly fussy; the directions are very clear and Tamasin's comments on each recipe not only helps to establish some context (why this recipe was chosen, where she got it, etc.) but also gives generally very useful information about the dish itself.

I don't find Tamasin bossy in the slightest. She knows what she wants and she goes for it. She's committed to excellence. What's wrong with that?

Really good cookbook and, if you are considering it for your very first of Tamasin's books, an excellent choice.

Forced, like rhubarb ...
Am I alone in finding Tamasin Day-Lewis hugely irritating?

Far from being the lovable "bossy matriarch" living an unapologetic posh life in the previous review, I see her as a hard-faced and forced personality wringing as much as she can commercially out of her very modest talents in writing and TV presenting.

Her narrative writing is so flat it's hard to be interested in her anecdotes - so you're left with the recipes which, with their hefty emphasis on choosing organic and specialist producers, and her oft-repeated (but unqualified and unexplained) "the best ..." epithet, are frustrating and difficult.

Everything seems to me to contain at least three more ingredients than it would need to be delicious rather than confusing.

Jamie Oliver might come across as a chav, but he is at least self-deprecating and has a natural sense of humour, and his recipes work.

Fabulously rewarding
I have to confess to being a fan of Tamasin Day-Lewis' persona as much as of her cooking. The magnificently bossy matriarch who insists on the best, organic ingredients for her recipes and whose TV show sees her living a comfortingly unapologetic posh life is absolutely the antidote we need to the goons who populate most cookery programmes (and thus, it would seem, cookery books). Tamasin reminds us that it can be the process, as much as the end result, that provides the real pleasure of cooking. That is not to say that she is an advocate of fiddly, difficult recipes and fancy presentation: on the contrary, her dishes are as hearty, flavoursome and satisfying as you could wish. Where she has the edge over so many of her contemporaries is that (in this, as with her other books) she has produced a collection that you want to get round to cooking in its entirety. Weekend cooking it may be, but I can think of no other book that I would be happier to cook from, from beginning to end.